Between “just punishment” and “unthinkable fascist crimes”: Reactions to Kristallnacht in civil war Spain

In November 1938, the last phase of the Spanish Civil War raged, a war that had begun two and a half years prior with General Francisco Franco’s uprising against the government of the Second Spanish Republic. The coverage ranged from pieces describing the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris to the international reactions to the pogroms and the Nazi government’s new anti-Semitic measures. Anti-Semitism acted as a cohesive agent for the Nationalist camp, with its multifaceted internal splits. Propaganda from the reactionary and Catholic Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA) exemplified precisely this widespread imagery. The historians Arno Lustiger and David Diamant estimate that more than seven thousands of the forty thousand International Brigade fighters who came to Spain were Jews. The anti-Semitic stereotypes and worldviews rooted in the thinking of a regime born in the ideological context of traditionalist Catholicism and European fascism persisted for a long time.